“It’s just too much of a coincidence” that the FAA rolled out a new $875 million AI tool meant to assist in managing air traffic the same day the United States experienced a nationwide ground stop, said CNN aviation analyst Mary Schiavo Friday.
Schiavo, the former Inspector General of the United States Department of Transportation, said:
I’ll read right from their press release, their new artificial intelligence tool called SMART, to assist in managing air traffic across the entire national airspace system, and it says it won’t affect safety. It’s called strategic management of airspace routing systems, and of course, we need new systems. But many times in the past, what we have seen, and this has gone back decades, is that because air traffic control is this piecemeal, mishmash of a whole bunch of different systems, and just as Pete said, some going back to radio, telephones and floppy disks, but when they put in new computer systems, they often have difficulty talking with communicating with or working with the much older systems.
And I have to say, it’s a tremendous amount of coincidence that right now, I mean, that they announced that they were going to start doing this, particularly since one of the goals of the SMART system — it’s not that we don’t need this — we need this. But one of the goals of the SMART system was to manage the en route traffic.
“And so if they’re putting in new software now, this new SMART system, to start managing that. And now we have a communications outage,” she added. “We’ve seen this so many times in the past. I don’t know if they’re linked, but it’s just too much of a coincidence that they’re trying to start that moving today, and now we have problems with the en route system.”
Schiavo also pointed out that there haven’t been any suggestions that the stoppage is due to “threats or criminal terror.” She added, “We haven’t heard anything like that. So I am guessing that once again we have a problem with new air traffic control computer systems, artificial intelligence. You know, modern systems, trying to communicate with old systems.”
Watch the above via CNN.
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